


Heartless

by Meatball42



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Amnesia, F/F, Gen, Heartbreak, Hearts, Implied/Referenced Torture, Imprisonment, Unreliable Narrator, in the literal sense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-15
Updated: 2018-03-15
Packaged: 2019-03-31 15:09:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13977702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meatball42/pseuds/Meatball42
Summary: Shaw remembers hearts, now. It’s hearts that give people their auras; the auras that she can see more clearly than anyone else in the world- not having one of her own in the way- but occasionally interprets worse than a child. Hearts that emanate light and emotion, that pulse with warmth, that break and hide and flee. Hearts that Shaw knows, better than anyone, with the flawless perspective of one born without.





	Heartless

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Beat of Our Noisy Hearts](https://archiveofourown.org/works/909642) by [cleflink](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cleflink/pseuds/cleflink). 



> Inspired by that fic ^ and others following this particular magical realism theme, which I fell in love with and wish there was more out there!

Finch. Reese. Groves.

These are the names of her prison guards.

And she. She is Shaw.

 

⎈

 

They say they are her friends, but they keep her tied to a bed. Being tied to a bed isn’t an unfamiliar sensation. Shaw thinks she’s been in this position many times before, both in her personal and her professional life. She has no idea what her professional life entails, but she doesn’t question the knowledge, either.

With her brain like Swiss cheese, there are a lot of things Shaw doesn’t know. Then there are some things that she just _knows_ , and doesn’t question.

 

⎈

 

The bed is actually a cot, but it’s more comfortable than a cot should be, and it’s tucked in the small lee of privacy between the front of a train car and a bank of electronics. The train car is underground, in a subway stop that Shaw knows is in New York. It could be a set, a recreation made to fool her, but it’s not. It really is the New York subway. Shaw doesn’t question this.

Finch stays with her most often, checking up on her and feeding her and talking to her (God, Shaw hates talking) in between typing away inside the train car. If Shaw cranes her neck, she can see him. She knows (she _knows_ ) that it was the man called Reese who set up her sightlines.

Rage burns inside her all the time, the only thing she ever feels, but there is a special flame set aside for Reese, for this.

 

⎈

 

Finch stays with her most often, but it is Groves who loves her the most. All of them care about her. Shaw can see it in their eyes, in their auras, the sappy, gooey, excessive emotion that it is, drooling everywhere and impeding efficiency. Groves’ whole face softens when she sees Shaw, when she touches her arm near the binding that keeps her from attacking them.

Shaw attacked them when she first woke up. She doesn’t remember it that much- her mind went away from her in a strange way when she woke up unrestrained. She gave Reese a nice shiner, though, and nearly winged him with his own gun, before he pinned her down.

He didn’t hit her back, not more than was necessary, not even enough to leave a mark. And when she was secured, there wasn’t an ounce of anger that she’d landed one on him. Shaw knew there ought to be, that it was the normal response, but there was only sadness.

Finch, standing a safe distance behind Reese, looked afraid.

Groves looked _vengeful_.

 

⎈

 

Reese is also John. Groves called him that, taunting, her tone too edgy to be completely friendly. Reese replied, his voice too calm to be completely friendly, and called her Root.

What the hell kind of name is Root Groves? Were her parents some God-awful commune-bound hippies? John Reese is an obvious fake, Shaw knows, but Root Groves? Or Groves Root, maybe? Just shitty enough to maybe be real.

Shaw thunks her head back against the pillow and wishes-

 

⎈

 

Finch is the easiest to read out of all of them, for all that he emotes the least. His aura is normal, unassuming. Reese and Groves can fake it, but Shaw knows better, and they are- abnormal, to say the least. They catch her eye.

Finch, though, is more or less your off-the-street kind of guy. There’s something Shaw’s missing, some layer to the world, that would explain why she knows this, or why she also knows it’s not quite true, but… she can’t reach it. It’s probably related to the way she shivers when Groves touches her, to the way Reese’s face rarely changes whether he’s hollow or full.

Shaw is always hollow.

 

⎈

 

The lights in Shaw’s area of the subway station have been carefully retrofitted to imitate natural light. She appreciates it: when her mind throws her into strange dreams, memories mixed with nightmares that she can’t tell apart; when she watches her jailers and forgets their names, only knows that they are targets, only knows that she is made to kill. When she comes back to herself, she can tell what time it is by how bright the lights are.

She’s still mad at Reese.

 

⎈

 

Reese comes over to give her some water and his heart is gone.

Shaw remembers hearts, now. It’s hearts that give people their auras; the auras that she can see more clearly than anyone else in the world- not having one of her own in the way- but occasionally interprets worse than a child. Hearts that emanate light and emotion, that pulse with warmth, that break and hide and flee. Hearts that Shaw knows, better than anyone, with the flawless perspective of one born without.

Shaw drinks the water, but her mind has drifted away again, and she is passive, like a doll. Reese is careful with her, touching her no more than necessary, and he lingers barely an extra second before returning to the train car.

 

⎈

 

Groves touches her, though. Strokes along her arm, pets her hair sometimes. Fiddles with Shaw’s shirt, flirty. She flirts. It’s annoying, but Shaw knows she’s not going to make Groves stop. She doesn’t mind, because she knows that she could cut Groves to shreds with just a few words, if she wanted to.

She doesn’t want to.

She wants to be let up, she wants to run. Shaw knows, the same way she knows everything else with no memory to back it up, that she is good at running.

Finch is the one who explained it, that first time she woke up, that the people who made her forget- Samaritan- will find her if she leaves. His aura rang clear with honesty, but that meant nothing, not with empty Reese and fractal Groves behind him. Shaw didn’t even know their names back then and she knew not to trust people like this bunch.

She knew- she _knows_ \- not to trust anyone.

 

⎈

 

Finch’s aura is generally clear. Shaw gets the sense that he doesn’t like lying, because more than once he has hesitated when he monologues to her and then apologizes for things he can’t say. When he does lie, though, his aura doesn’t change. Shaw can only read it because she’s staring, dead-eyed, at his face, and there are no emotions to blind her vision.

His heart is damaged, but whole. Shaw can’t hate him for it, because then she’d be hating most of the world, and she doesn’t have the heart for that much emotion.

 

⎈

 

One time, her hearing gets very acute. Usually it’s touch, which means Shaw is begrudgingly grateful for the softness of the bed under her, the padding on the manacles. But one time it’s hearing, and Shaw overhears a hushed conversation inside the train car.

“-doing the right thing?” Finch murmurs fretfully. “Keeping her like a prisoner?”

“Better a prisoner than dead,” Groves snaps. There’s fear underneath, grief and the ever-present hysteria that Shaw had picked out before.

“We can’t let her go until she remembers,” Reese says in his whispery voice. Underneath, there is mourning, certainty, and… humor.

Shaw pokes at that, in the relative privacy of her own mind. There’s something there that she _knows_ …

Because Reese is like her. She’s furious with him because he’s _like her_ , and he knows exactly what it means to be held, tied down in pretty much open air like this, and he’s doing it anyway. But this is also the gentlest a prison she could have, and that’s why it’s funny.

Shaw rolls her eyes so hard. She’s still mad at Reese.

 

⎈

 

Once she figures it out, she can see it without effort. Reese runs missions, and he’s like her, so that means she must run missions. That’s a profession that would lead to her getting tied up, and it’s also one she’d be well-suited for, having no heart.

Reese takes his heart out every time he goes on a mission. There’s a box in the train car where he leaves it behind, locked by a computer and a combination. Shaw can hear it when he operates it, because Finch’s typing always stops, and Groves always makes herself scarce.

Reese is dead silent when he does it, not a whimper of pain or a gasp of loss, and Shaw knows she should feel sorry for him, but she’s not capable.

 

⎈

 

Groves never takes her heart out. Shaw thinks about it once, idly, and nearly laughs. How could she? Her heart shimmers in odd formations, her aura alluring in the way it shifts: strange angles, impenetrable planes, and dagger-sharp shards. It’s the kind of heart that shattered young and never grew whole again. If she tried to take it out, it would fall to pieces.

It means she can lie, though. Her aura is never once clear, so there’s no way to spot a lie. She tells Shaw stories, sometimes, sitting beside her cot and gazing across the station like it’s a tranquil lake. They’re lies, each and every one, and if there’s a grain of truth dotted here or there, Shaw would never know. She thinks she can tell, though, sometimes, and she doesn’t mind either way.

Groves calls Shaw Sameen, sometimes, and it makes Shaw shiver inside. She pretends she doesn’t feel anything at all.

 

⎈

 

Shaw doesn’t have an aura. She looks down at her body sometimes, flexes her fingers and twists her wrists inside their bindings, and wonders at the complete absence of light coming from her body, even when she focuses.

It’s not like when Reese takes out his heart and his aura softens to a glimmer, fading even more the longer he goes without it. There’s still something to his skin, something that tells people, perhaps he’s been hurt and has hidden his heart, or perhaps it was tied to someone else’s and fled when they departed. It lets people think he’s like them, and that lets him walk right up to someone and shoot them in their own heart.

No one would mistake Shaw as having a heart, not once they really looked.

 

⎈

 

Reese always takes out his heart when he lets her up to stretch and do body-weight exercises and shower. It lets him watch her dispassionately. If she were to fake an illness or injury, if she were twitchy with a planned escape, he would see it, vision unfettered by emotion. It hurts him, every time, but he does it so she can get up from the bed.

Shaw doesn’t feel gratitude, but she understands debt, and that’s why she tells him she doesn’t need to get up one morning when he comes for her and his aura has nearly disappeared into his skin, when the rings under his eyes are deep and dark. He watches her for a moment, weighing, and then he inclines his head and goes back into the train car.

That night, Finch feeds her a sub so good that she moans out loud, and Finch laughs.

 

⎈

 

The three of them come to talk to her. Groves sits beside her bed, Finch stands next to her, and Reese leans against the wall by Shaw’s feet.

They’ve managed to get some information from the enemy’s systems. They know what the enemy did to her. Tortures normally aimed at the subject’s heart, just to see what effect they’d have on Shaw, the woman without one. Lies aimed at her mind, because they didn’t realize her heartlessness meant she was the best at seeing through them, instead of blinded. They saw her lack of aura, her honesty and bluntness, and assumed she was hedonistic (true), a weapon to be aimed (fairly true), and malleable (hell no).

Groves grins a sharp, wicked grin when she details Samaritan’s mistakes. Finch’s aura is bright with rewarded hope, and his voice is animated when they explain how they can fix Shaw.

Reese doesn’t smile, but he gives her his heart.

 

⎈

 

They thought she might need a strong heart to repair the damage caused to her chest cavity, but Finch’s heart burned when it touched her- too bright for a space that had only ever known darkness. She couldn’t bring herself to mind, though, because Finch had cried out in pain when he took his heart out and looked broken until Reese finished closing it back up inside him afterwards. Not that Shaw _cared_ , but she didn’t want him to hurt like that.

Reese’s heart is a small, dull thing. Once it might have been bigger, but if you take a heart out too many times it shrivels, there’s no way around it. It has one long crack down the middle that nearly cleaved the thing in two, but it’s holding together. When it’s inside her chest, Shaw can feel where one solid whack would shatter it, and she maybe stands closer behind Finch’s chair than she otherwise would. Reese doesn’t show any signs of discomfort when he puts his heart inside Shaw, but she wants to take care of it anyway.

They let her up from the bed when Reese is out now, knowing Reese’s heart would never let her hurt them. Even when he’s full again, Shaw can feel an echo from it, _ba-dum, ba-dum_. It’s strange, feeling that pulsing in her chest where there’s always been stillness, but it makes her feel warm, and surrounded in a good way.

Groves doesn’t touch her when she’s carrying Reese’s heart. Finch smiles at her more than he usually does. And when Reese shoots someone, or fights someone, or saves someone, outside and above and away, Shaw can feel it through him, and it feels right in a way nothing else does.

 

⎈

 

She remembers more, now. She remembers tactics, at least, and she leaves the subway station once to provide backup for Finch when the others are needed elsewhere. The moving air feels so good on her skin, but there’s no resonance of freedom, escape from confinement, joy in motion, that Shaw knows even she ought to feel.

The only thing that makes her feel anything is the dog that they bring back, now that they’re not afraid she might hurt it.

Shaw remembers her childhood, too-clear eyes and all. She remembers med school, everything she ever learned about the human body coming back in an instant when Reese jabbed a man over the xiphoid process. She remembers Cole, barely. And after him, nothing.

Groves watches her, and though she manipulates her own aura to hide any semblance of a wobble, Shaw knows she’s hurt.

For a moment, she wishes she could care.

 

⎈

 

They’re tucked around the corner from a contingent of Samaritan agents, no way out. They’ll be found in moments. Shaw squeezes the grips of her guns, prepared to take some down with her.

Groves puts away her guns and puts her hands on the sides of Shaw’s face. Shaw knows what she’s going to do, but she doesn’t stop her. For everything she can’t give to this woman whose sharp eyes only ever soften when she looks at Shaw, what’s a kiss?

Groves steps close and kisses her. Her heart is beating fast, fast with fear and adrenaline and love and the strength the body summons when it knows its light is about to be snuffed out. Her heart beats, strong and fast and in the moment of the knowledge of death it reaches out to Shaw.

Samantha ‘Root’ Groves pulls back, and Sameen Shaw, who cannot love but decided to let herself be loved anyway, grins.


End file.
